Atxu Amann

Presentation

Atxu Amann works as an architect at the studio Temperaturas Extremas and as a teacher at the department of Architectural Graphic Conception at the School of Architecture of Madrid. Her work in both aspects has been credited for its innovative nature. Since 2006, she is a Doctor of Architecture. She wrote the thesis El espacio doméstico: La mujer y la casa.

Atxu Amann Alcocer (Madrid, 1961) graduated as an architect at the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid in 1987. In the same year she founded the studio Temperaturas Extremas together with Andrés Cánovas Alcaraz and Nicolás Maruri Mendoza. Their housing projects, most of them executed as a result of winning public competitions, question traditional residences. They provide users with the opportunity of appropriating spaces that meet their actual requirements, looking for “social sustainability”. At the same time, they pay attention to intermediate spaces, spaces with no filter between interior and exterior and spaces for relations between neighbours. Besides residential housing, they are the authors of some famous cultural facilities in which they reject current solutions and use Architecture as a tool for thinking and intervening from the project, even at risk of attacking, modifying or transforming precedent works.

Between 1996 and 2006 she directed together with Andrés Cánovas Arquitectos, the magazine of the Consejo Superior de Colegios de Arquitectos de España (the higher council of Architects Associations in Spain). She has also directed the postgraduate courses of Editorial Design for the European Social Fund and taught postgraduate courses of Graphic Editorial Design at the College of Fine Arts of Madrid. She is a teacher at the Department of Architectural Graphic Conception of the Superior Technical School of Architecture of Madrid. Her students say about her lessons that “you have heaps of fun and you learn a lot, in a non-orthodox manner.” In 2009, the Technical University of Madrid awarded her effort in pedagogical innovation, recognizing her creation of new interdisciplinary subjects and new educational strategies that connect academic world with social reality. She is also the main researcher at Hypermedia: Workshop for Architectural Configuration and Communication and directs the Master’s Degree of Architectural Communication of the Technical University of Madrid.

In 2006, she obtained a distinction cum laude for her thesis El espacio doméstico: La mujer y la casa, directed by the Emeritus Professor Javier Seguí de la Riva and mentored by the Doctor of Architecture María Teresa Muñoz. This thesis chooses to have an essay format, which is based in the selection of clippings from daily press that she uses to establish a dialogue around housing, contemporary reality and gender. It has been edited as a book by Nobuko publishers.

She also discusses the relationship between gender and architecture, more in particular with  the practice of the profession of architect, in her meaningful article “Arquitectas-Arquitectos” published in the magazine Arquitectos in 2009. She deals with the issues that come from the incorporation of women into professional practice and teaching and from the conciliation of labour with care-giving tasks.